Soft 404 checker
A soft 404 is a missing page that tells search engines “200 OK”. Enter any page on your site: LinkGuard asks your server for it and for a page that cannot exist, then compares the answers.
Test for soft 404s
Two requests: your URL, and a random nonsense path on the same domain.
What Google means by a soft 404
Google Search Console reports “Soft 404” when a URL answers 200 OK but the page looks like an error or is nearly empty: a “Sorry, that product is no longer available” template, an empty search result, or a redirect of every dead URL to the home page. Google's documentation says it treats these like real 404s and drops them from the index, but only after spending crawl effort working that out.
The fix is almost always simple: make the server send the status code that matches the truth.
- Gone for good: return 404, or 410 if you want to say “deliberately removed”.
- Moved: 301 to the closest real equivalent, not to the home page.
- Thin but real (an empty category, an out-of-stock product): add genuine content, or
noindexit until it has some. - Single-page apps: client-side routers often serve the same 200 shell for every path. Configure the host to return 404 for unknown routes, or add a
noindexmeta tag on the rendered error view.
A soft 404 looks present but isn't. A new Moon is the reverse, fully there but unlit from where we stand; ahaboo walks through why the Moon has phases.
What the crawler sees
A product was discontinued. Choose how the server responds and watch what happens to the URL.
- Visitor sees
- An apology page.
- Googlebot concludes
- Server says it exists, content says it doesn't. Has to guess.
- Search Console
- Soft 404 (excluded after re-crawls)
Questions people ask
What is a soft 404 error?
A page that does not really exist (or has no meaningful content) but whose server replies 200 OK instead of 404 Not Found. Search engines have to guess it is an error, and they report it as a soft 404.
Are soft 404s bad for SEO?
They waste crawl budget and can keep junk URLs in circulation. Google eventually treats them as 404s, so the direct ranking effect is small, but they hide real problems in your reports and confuse visitors.
Is redirecting all 404s to the home page OK?
No. Google explicitly says mass redirects to the home page are treated as soft 404s. Redirect only to a genuinely equivalent page and let the rest return 404.
How do I find soft 404s on my site?
Search Console lists them under Pages → “Soft 404”. To test your server's behaviour directly, use the checker above: if a made-up URL returns 200, every mistyped link to your site is a soft 404.